EARLY YEARS 
and her own people. Miss Bill is now grown 
up, and has been married three times and 
widowed, not by death but by desertion. She 
is known as a "Holy Terror." I do not know 
the reason why, but I have my suspicions. 
The memory of the mnter of 1894 and 1895 
and the summer following will never leave me. 
The events of the journey to 87° 6' in 1906 and 
the discovery of the North Pole in 1909 are in- 
delibly impressed on my mind, but the recol- 
lections of the long race with death across the 
450 miles of the ice-cap of North Greenland 
in 1895, with Commander Peary and Hugh 
Lee, are still the most vivid. 
For weeks and weeks, across the seemingly 
never-ending wastes of the ice-cap of North 
Greenland, I marched "v^dth Peary and Lee 
from Independence Bay and the land beyond 
back to Anniversary Lodge. We started on 
April 1, 1895, with three sledges and thirty- 
seven dogs, with the object of determining 
to a certainty the northeastern terminus of 
Greenland. We reached the northern land 
beyond the ice-cap, but the condition of the 
country did not allow much exploration, and 
after killing a few musk-oxen we started on 
9 
